Last year, Lovett launched Lab Atlanta (LAB ATL), an innovative new school model for 10th graders. Designed as a semester school, LAB ATL enrolls students from Atlanta’s public and independent schools in an honors-level, experiential, and seminar-like study of the city and challenges the students to complete capstones in areas of interest they uncover. The first two semesters have been run as small pilots, helping us learn how best to integrate students across a diverse landscape both socially and academically. Our pilots have been enormously helpful and successful. Hunter Smith, one of the founding students in our Spring 2017 cohort, has just returned from Stanford where she presented her capstone on affordable housing at the FabLearn conference! Our current students (coming from Drew Charter, Lovett, Paideia, Grady, and North Atlanta) and their families are exclaiming over the depth of learning, the incredible support for each student in developing his/her voice--both written and orally--, the wide-ranging experiences in the city (and the expansive network of people to whom students have access), and the opportunity to learn with new friends across the zip codes of Atlanta.

We are very pleased to announce today that after extensive work with Atlanta Public Schools, the Georgia Department of Education, and the Georgia High School Athletic Association, Lab Atlanta has been approved as a ground-breaking new model that will allow students who attend LABATL to be jointly enrolled at their home school. Effective immediately, students who are accepted and enroll at LABATL for a semester of 10th grade may be enrolled at their home school and participate in athletics and extracurricular activities outside of the school day, subject to the home school’s conditions and requirements. The LAB ATL daily schedule will move back and run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. in order to allow time for students to return to their home schools as needed in the afternoon. We are very excited to be able now to take our program to a scale of 24 students per semester, and we are inviting current 10th graders to consider LABATL for the upcoming spring semester. We also encourage current 8th and 9th grade families to consider the opportunity for 10th grade.

Lab Atlanta has a limited number of openings per school and per semester. Applications for the upcoming spring semester (again, current 10th graders only) are now open and will close on Monday, November 14, 2017. The application and extensive information about the Lab Atlanta semester can be found at www.labatlanta.org. Admissions decisions will be made by Monday, December 4.

If you are interested in touring Lab Atlanta or want more information, please reach out directly to Laura Deisley, Executive Director, at laura.deisley@lovett.org or at (470) 355-4894.

Please join us in celebrating this milestone in our ongoing efforts to connect Atlanta area students more authentically to the city and to one another.